General sound map

Recordings of background atmospheres and incidental noises from all over London. Some form part of a sound grid series recorded at evenly-spaced points across the city, each marking the centre of a square on the map below.

Cornwallis Road N9 June 2:00

Grid square: South Chingford, Higham

Recording date: 13 June 2015

Time of day: 2.25pm

Location: Halfway along Cornwallis Road, north London.

Description: Distant traffic, slamming of car doors, footsteps and voices of passersby, airplane drone, a heavy object is dragged across the pavement, faint birdsong, a dog barks, music from a radio in a house, occasional passing vehicles.

Bath Road N9 June 2:00

Grid square: South Chingford, Higham

Recording date: 13 June 2015

Time of day: 2.15pm

Location: Bath Road near junction with Exeter Road, north London.

Description: Constant traffic in distance, children's voices, occasional vehicles passing closer by along Bath Road and Exeter Road, faint airplane drone, a man speaks into a mobile phone on the other side of the road.

Kariba Close N9 June 2:00

Grid square: South Chingford, Higham

Recording date: 13 June 2015

Time of day: 12.50pm

Location: East end of Kariba Close, north London.

Description: Distant traffic, a man and a woman talk as they walk from a nearby house, faint music from a radio heard briefly, distant banging noises from an industrial estate, an indistinct sound from a radio heard towards the end.

TQ 3627 9205 1:00

Description: Recording made under a tree, its trunk used as a wind-break. Constant mass traffic noise from the North Circular junction with Hall Lane. A bird cries briefly and the breeze rustles leaf litter on the ground.

About general sound map recordings

The majority of recordings on the general sound map are simply of curious or distinctive sounds heard around London. Some also appear elsewhere as part of the 12 Tones of London statistical recording project, and here are subsumed into their appropriate grid squares.

These kinds of recordings always have descriptive file names which don't require any further explanation. But just over a hundred others have ones consisting only of the letters 'TQ' followed by eight digits. These are the Ordnance Survey co-ordinates marking the exact centre of each of the sound map's 112 grid squares, and so these file names tell you with some precision where the recordings were made. Reaching each point was done with the help of a GPS receiver and a willingness to scramble over fences and run onto golf courses. The contents of those recordings are summarised in the graphic below:

The key on the left-hand side shows the most common sound categories encountered. The louder a particular sound type encountered at the centre of a grid square, the darker its icon. More than one icon of the same kind means that sound takes up more of the recording's length. Despite the wide spacing of the recording points and the brief duration of the sound files, they seem to do a reasonable job of plotting in outline the common or persistent sound types heard around London during the daytime.